Tuesday, October 9

Pre-Season Begins

So, the long haul kicks off tonight in Sacramento. You know Sacramento; it's the place David Stern pays attention to.

(Sorry, how about a moratorium on arena- and owner-bashing for the rest of the pre-season. At least until Clay Bennett's inevitable press conference the day after opening night).

Anyhow, PJ Carlesimo has yet to release a starting lineup for tonight's affair at Arco Arena, but from all reports it sounds as though the game will be even more pre-season than normal, and that the coaching staff is looking at it as merely another form of practice.

As Kevin Pelton points out at the supersonics.com blog, Gelabale, Szczerbiak, Swift, and Thomas will likely all sit out due to minor injuries.

One minor thing I'm trying to find information on: pre-season stats. I can't seem to find info anywhere on pre-season stats from previous seasons, and I would like to do a comparison of highly touted rookies in the past few years to see how their exhibition stats stacked up to their regular season ones. It might be illustrative for Durant and, to a lesser extent, Jeff Green. Any help would be appreciated.

If we could remove Wilkins and put in Green, then I think the Sonics would have relatively effective offensive unit on the floor. That said, PJ might just be joggling lineups all preseason and this might just be 1 of 9 different starting lineups. Plus, it doesn't matter who starts, look what SA did with Manu last season. Sometime you can put a strong, starter type player on the bench as you 6th man, who logs 25 to 30 mins a night.

So in short don't get caught up in preseason lineups, at least not until PJ had a couple games to see his units play.

Preseason stuff can be hard to find, especially past years. The espn link was news to me and I had to dig underneath the surface to resurrect last season's data at dougstats. Look forward to reading what you writeup.